In March 1963, Pierre Boulez delivered an address to the Festival of Contemporary Arts at the University of Illinois in Urbana on the topic of music and poetry. After a brief introduction by Igor Stravinsky, Boulez reflects on his work with the texts of Stephane Mallarmé and on the challenge of relating those “two sacred monsters’, music and poetry. After tracing the history of setting poetry to music, Boulez defends his own “abstract” way of handling texts, all the while insisting that there be some relationship between the meaning of the texts and the motivation of the music. This lecture has been published by the 1986 Harvard University Press volume “Orientations: Collected Writings by Pierre Boulez”, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and translated by Martin Cooper.

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